“When you write a book you are alone, and you need solitude, concentration, a sort of silence. But when I’m with a director, I love to go on walks, to sit down at the terrace of the café, to observe, to look at people. Everything comes from life, no doubt about it. When I first met Jacques Tati, I received—I don’t know how to translate exactly—des leçons du regard, ’the teaching how to look.’ A filmmaker doesn’t look around like anybody, or a photographer, or a painter. They look in a different way. For example, I am a close friend of Julian Schnabel. He lives in my place in Paris, I live in his place in New York. When we go together to see an exhibit, for instance, we went to see a Van Gogh exhibit in Paris last summer, he looks the way a painter looks at a painting. He teaches me. I’m learning from him things that I would never, never have thought about. For instance, when you pose in front of a painter, the look from the painter to you is not the same as the look from the photographer. He’s looking for something else. That’s extremely interesting. Being motionless in front of a great painter for two hours is a real experience. He finds things inside yourself that you ignore.”

It’s perhaps only natural that a film festival as wide-ranging as the Berlinale would include a few documentaries about filmmakers, and there are two excellent ones this year as part of the Forum sidebar. One is Walter Salles’s Jia Zhang-ke, a Guy from Fenyang, a portrait of the great Chinese filmmaker mostly in his own words. Much of the doc follows Jia as he wanders around various Chinese towns that are featured in his films, reminiscing both about his own past and about the making of his work. Occasionally, he’s accompanied in his wanderings by some of his actors: Wang Hongwei, his lead in 1997’s Xiao Wu and 2000’s Platform, follows Jia as he walks around in his hometown of Fenyang; later, Han Sanming does the accompanying honors as Jia explores Fengjie, the village along the Yangtze River that is prominently featured in his 2006 film Still Life. (Interestingly, Jia’s frequent leading lady and now-wife, Zhao Tao, is seen only in isolated interviews, not alongside her husband—though, considering how personal Zhao’s own recollections are, perhaps this strategy makes a certain sense.)

It’s decision time and our gurus of gold bring you tidings of great confusion. This year’s nominees for documentary short are all, almost conspicuously, united by their deployment of the canniest of distancing effects. They’re also among the most galvanizing selections we’ve ever had the pleasure of screening—if pleasure is the word to describe how they’ve harpooned our hearts, minds, and seemingly impenetrable tear ducts. Just about the only thing we can agree on is that, as a piece of filmmaking, Gabriel Serra’s The Reaper has no equal here, but that a victory for this haunting, expressionistic, and deeply graphic articulation of a slaughterhouse worker’s relationship to death seems impossible in a world where Richard Linklater is probably the only AMPAS member to have ever made it through the entirety of Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons without covering his eyes.

“By drawing our eyes to the pattern on the rug so completely, disallowing us from looking anywhere else in the room for an extended period of time, Davies pointedly frames this unremarkable carpet as a self-contained work of art in its own right. Indeed, the pattern, which offers no symmetry or coherent structure (its lines and waves are unsettlingly inconsistent), might strike some as a painterly piece of lyrical abstraction, its coldness put into relief by the sunlight cast upon it. We are forced to consider its shapes as though we have been drawn to them in a museum. The rug acts as a passive, found art object and an active signal to Davies’s memories; either way, it is spectacular in its inescapable mundaneness.”

“There is a wishful whiff of ’too big to fail’ thinking, if not outright tulip fever, about this multi-studio scrum involving dozens of projects, billions of dollars, and the fervent belief that the audience will remain big enough to prevent these movies from cannibalizing one another. Shouldn’t the struggle of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which was spun out of the highest-grossing comic-book movie in history and which could barely get through its freshman season, give everyone pause? Sure, execution counts: The second Captain America movie has outgrossed the first by $75 million because it’s better, and Spidey’s downward spiral is largely the fault of weak, repetitive storytelling (and also of a character too light and thin to support such somber and protracted attention). If Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had been at its strongest from day one, perhaps we’d be talking about it as a major hit rather than, as the New York Times recently called it, a ’disappointment’ that proved ’inaccessible for many rank-and-file viewers.’”

“Not including the Mickey Maguire shorts, Mr. Rooney made more than 200 movies, earning a total of four Academy Award nominations—he was nominated for best supporting actor as the fast-talking soldier who dies trying to protect $30,000 he won in a craps game in ’The Bold and the Brave’ (1956) and as the trainer of a wild Arabian horse in ’The Black Stallion’ (1979). (Because of his size, Mr. Rooney played a lot of jockeys and, as his waistline expanded, former jockeys who had become trainers. He was the vagabond who helps Elizabeth Taylor turn an unruly horse into a steeplechase champion in her breakthrough film, ’National Velvet,’ in 1944.)”

Although he’s generally considered among the most critically acclaimed of contemporary German directors, Christian Petzold and his films remain relatively unknown to North American audiences. Perhaps that’s because of the exceedingly specific cultural formations within which Petzold’s films take place, namely the neoliberal spaces of contemporary Germany, where places and setting play just as significant a role as the characters, themselves. At least, these are the foundations of analysis laid out by Jaimey Fisher’s excellent new book examining Petzold’s entire filmography; Fisher seeks to contextualize Petzold’s films within prior scholarship, which has generally discussed their “movement spaces” (space remade by systems of mobility in modern society), but perhaps more importantly, he examines the ways in which neoliberal developments have “changed how individuals experience work, relationships, and themselves.” These combined help articulate what Fisher deems Petzold’s “ghostly archeology,” and terms his films “art-house genre cinema.”

The latter point is likely Fisher’s most provocative and reflexive, given that the neoliberal dimensions of Petzold’s cinema are seemingly their most explicit elements. In films like Yella, these financial motivators are made literal within the narrative, but in Jerichow, they’re more firmly filtered through a genre prism—in its case, film noir and, more specifically, The Postman Always Rings Twice. In fact, Fisher goes so far as to name a genre film in relation to nearly Petzold film, as a barometer for the levels of genre engagement. Sometimes they’re more obvious, as with Jerichow or even Yella, which takes Carnival of Souls as its basis. In other cases, however, the relationships are more opaque and unusual, as with the comparison of The Last Picture Show and Near Dark to The State I Am In, not because of directly identical narrative parallels, but more due to sensibility and style; thus, with Petzold, as with Peter Bogdanovich and Kathryn Bigelow, Fisher talks about each director’s refusal of nostalgia and recognition of creating art at the end of either a cycle or time period—“a fading western lifestyle.”

Editor’s Note: In light of Sight & Sound’s film poll, which, every decade, queries critics and directors the world over before arriving at a communal Top 10 list, we polled our own writers, who didn’t partake in the project, but have bold, discerning, and provocative lists to share.

I can identify two elements common to the films that ended up on this list. They are either about feminine suffering and/or about the impossibility of language to ever quite translate feeling. The criteria which I came up with for this impossible, unfair, and incredibly fun assignment involved remembering the films that led me to think “This is one of the best films ever made” at the time I first saw them, and which, upon a re-screening, several years later, remained just as remarkable—perhaps for different reasons. Also part of the criteria was my (failed) attempt at not repeating directors, and making a conscious effort to go against a cinematic “affirmative action” that would try to represent different periods of time, countries, and genres. It’s also mind-boggling to notice how half of the list includes films made in the mid 1970s. But the list escapes traditional logic. It’s the warping, re-signifying logic of affect and memory that architected this list, which turns out to be nothing short of this cinephile’s symptom.

The operative sensibility of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cinema is panoptical. One is always being watched by the indiscriminating, playful eye of seductress and demagogue, treating filmmaking as a messy encounter between fantasy and reality that transpires across rooms rather than on stage. For Fassbinder, rooms are prosceniums that enchant the camera. His Beware of a Holy Whore, from 1971, makes an inventory of its characters as they slouch on sofas and sprawl across beds. They’re the cast and crew of a troubled film headed by an incongruously tempered director (Lou Castel) supplemented by an aged Eddie Constantine and a Monroe blonde dressed in a skimpy variant from The Seven Year Itch. And as an inventory in images, Fassbinder’s film is peculiarly elusive, its camera almost always panning and surveying, its characters dancing in rococo rooms to the sound of American pop music. It’s a film stocked with incidents that deceive, and with moments of alleged narrative import that devolve ad infinitum into fragments that resist narrative coherence.